Michael F. Moore

An Italian teacher’s relationship with his male student sparks legal and personal turmoil in this compelling novel of truth, desire, and power.A group of old friends are unexpectedly reunited in Calabria for a dinner party. When the conversation turns from reminiscing about their teen years to recent allegations against a local teacher, Marco Ferro, it unsettles the narrator. Days later, still reeling from the news, he sets out to learn more, grappling with the murky facts. His search rekindles a relationship with his former high school friend—Federica, beautiful and spoiled, married to Lino, and the mother of three boys—which in turn unspools in complicated and unanticipated ways. The action then moves to Tunisia, London, and Rome, in an incessant pursuit of who tells and who is told. In the end, it is the story of Marco Ferro and his young student Yussef, played out in both courtrooms and newspaper columns, that restores truth to the complicated sentimental geometries of the narrator and Federica.Exploring secrets and entangled power dynamics, Mario Fortunato’s timely new novel raises questions that rarely have simple or unequivocal answers.

When in 1999 30-year-old Matteo B. Bianchi published his debut novel - a scathing portrait of the sentimental education of a gay boy from Milan in the 1980s - the timing couldn''t be worse: he had just lost S., the man he''d lived with for 7 years, who one day, a few months after they broke up, decided to hang himself in their apartment. Matteo is the first to find the body, to scream without being able to scream. From that day a ''dark labyrinth'' ensnares him, a whirlpool of suffering, made up of contradictory feelings and constant bewilderment, which unites all the so-called survivors of the suicide of a loved one. Matteo seems to be the unhappy protagonist of a rare event as he feels a unique pain, perversely special. However, at the same time, even in the darkest days, the writer who lives in him starts taking notes. At first, they are just fragments, shards of an existence shattered into a thousand pieces, echoes of feelings alive like nerves that Matteo reports unabashedly on the page. Then, they slowly transform and, memory after memory, become a profound and intimate conversation with S. and the pain, between the temptation to let go and the desire to get back to life. Both radical and vulnerable, intimate and universal, The Life of Those Who Remain is a devastating but luminous novel about surviving the aftermath of trauma. Bianchi produces pages of excruciating beauty, recounting his journey to redemption, hope, and rebirth, and showing how, even in the depths of the most unspeakable pain, writing-his own, and also powerful works such as Joan Didion''s The Year of Magical Thinking and Ocean Vuong''s On Earth We''re Briefly Gorgeous-can still save.